okay, so, do you remember that bit in metroid prime that everyone hates where the game is about to be over and they make you go retrace your steps and find a bunch of doodads before you can finish the game? nancy drew: hidden in a haunted mansion also does this except there are many chances to get game overs because people catch you snooping through their shit while you're looking for a character from the chinese alphabet and fuckin sorry abby one of them is in your room and who the fuck am i gonna tell your secret to anyway???? i am friends with your business partner i do not want your business to fail, jesus

this game has a lot of opportunities to get game overs, basically all of which are rendered funny instead of frustrating by the game's surprisingly excellent checkpointing for a game from 2000, which means it's a lot more fun to intentionally crawl into a pitch black fireplace passage or untie a chandelier like an asshole just to see what will happen (it turns out only one game over i found leads to a gruesome death in this game lol usually your moral character is insulted and you get kicked out because in this game NOBODY present knows Nancy is undercover).

and that's the rub with this one: you kinda gotta make your own fun? it's not nearly as much of a CHORE to go through as Stay Tuned For Danger, but it suffers from similar core problems like an interminably boring cast (only this time the bad guy sucks too) and really languid sense of pacing. puzzles are better, sort of, in that they're placed more naturally throughout the gamespace AND the narrative (i will miss you, millie the eccentric millionaire prop room manager riddler), but they're also mostly pretty bad lol so who can say if they're better or worse? I can, they're better, but there's PLENTY of room to improve.

similarly the plot seems like it might actually be building to something cool, and there are certainly moments, especially early on, that are legitimately /scary/. there's an excellent buildup of dread immediately after the supernatural element of the game seems like its been established as silly and joking that persists up until it's...casually discarded, and the true stakes of the narrative are revealed to be entirely unrelated to most of what you've been doing. sure, you and the villain are after the same thing, and the historical background of the story is both interesting and sad, but this is a haunted old mansion that's falling apart, and I'M the one creeping around secret tunnels spying on people? the villain doesn't even KNOW about them?????

the consequence for failure during the climax is a guy walks away from you with a suitcase full of money that nobody else even knew about. nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, and the accidents that have been plaguing renovation work on your friend's burgeoning bed and breakfast will stop because the perpetrator got what they wanted and left. This, too, is a microcosm of all of the issues with Message in a Haunted Mansion; at every turn the game goes out of its way to eliminate stakes, to destroy its own carefully cultivated atmosphere, and with nothing to show at the end of it. Legitimately baffling choices throughout.

as much as i've lambasted it though, /i can see it/. fucking around in this mansion is fun as hell. this is a good video game mansion. it's brightly lit, and small, and creepy to inhabit. Her Interactive was playing with the limitations of the point n click fmv format in very cute ways to mess with my expectations of what was possible. one-time custom animations everywhere, just to freak me out; sections of the game where it was unclear if i was under a time limit or not (i was lol, got kicked out of the house whoops). there's ambition here, and the shape of a good formula for these is slowly coming together, bit by bit. hopefully they'll continue to improve (and hopefully the leaps in quality will start getting bigger lol)

PREVIOUSLY: STAY TUNED FOR DANGER
NEXT TIME: TREASURE IN THE ROYAL TOWER

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES